Nessus Installation Guide

Intro

Nessus is a proprietary vulnerability scanner developed by Tenable, Inc. This blog is about the installation of Nessus Essentials on Linux.

Installation

Register

First lets register in Tenable Nessus Essentials to get the activation code.

Enter your information in the register form shown above, click Get Started.

Download Nessus

We should have received a mail with Activation Code. Note down the activation code and click the Download Nessus for the downloading page.

Select the Platform and Nessus Version then, download the package using prefered method.

Navigate to the downloaded directory.

cd ~/Downloads
# in case of Linux and downloaded file is in Downloads directory.

Install the downloaded package.

sudo dpkg -i Nessus-*.deb
# in case of Debian Linux/Ubuntu

Start Nessus Service

Start the Nessus service.

/bin/systemctl start nessusd.service

The above command will start the Nessus service, which we can use at https://127.0.0.1:8834/ in browser. Open this URL in browser.

Follow the process to get into the Nessus home page.

Install Offline

Check the Register Offline button and click continue.

Select Nessus Essentials.

We need to have a Listence Key to continue. To get one, lets go with Offline Registration.

We need Challenge Code and activation code to move further. We got activation code in the mail received. Follow the below process to get Challenge code.

Challenge Code

sudo /opt/nessus/sbin/nessuscli fetch --challenge

By running the above command, will get the challenge code.

Submit the challenge code and acivation code.

Now we should get the Licence.

Copy and paste the Licence Staring and click Continue.

Create the username and password. Note this for logging in the future.

Nessus installed and initilized successfully.

Plugin Install

Inorder to use Nessus for scanning, plugins should be installed. Follow the above image to install basic nessus plugins. About --> Sowtware Update --> Update all components --> Save. Wait for some time to so that plugins will be installed. Status of plugin installation will be observed in notification section which is in top right of the screen.